The central goal of the proposed project is to test the mediating role of marital functioning on the relation between parental alcoholism and adolescent/young adult offspring drug use/abuse. Research shows that spouses of alcoholics are at increased risk for marital problems, and that children of dysfunctional marriages are at increased risk for drug use/abuse; however, this mediator model has not been tested. Two secondary goals of this project are to test: (a) the longitudinal and reciprocal relations between trajectories of spouses' alcohol use/abuse and marital functioning; and (b) the family and parenting processes that account for the relation between parents' marital functioning and offspring drug use/abuse. These goals will make important contributions to drug use/abuse theory and help to identify appropriate family variables for substance use prevention and intervention programs. These goals will be accomplished using five waves of data from an ongoing study of substance use and abuse in children of alcoholics and nonalcoholic controls that began in 1988, and will be tested using advanced statistical techniques including latent curve and hierarchical linear modeling. Families were recruited from community sources, and DSM-111 alcoholism diagnoses were obtained via face-to-face interviews with the parents. The mean age of these children at Wave 1 was 12.5 years, 24% were Hispanic, and 46% were female.